


tried to escape (kicking screaming)

by kiira



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/F, it's kinda one-sided as most of this fic takes place before buffy and faith meet in person, suicide mention cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-05
Updated: 2015-01-05
Packaged: 2018-03-05 11:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3119033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiira/pseuds/kiira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>faith traveling from boston to sunnydale (you don't know what it's like to be sixteen with no place to go)</p>
            </blockquote>





	tried to escape (kicking screaming)

It’s a dream that calls her to you: you’re asleep, curled in blankets on your (dead, dead, dead) watcher’s couch and the dream is something airy, something light, something the dead opposite of blood in a warehouse and the sound of ripping flesh (the brand of something hot and burning against your arm; his laugh still ringing in your ears).

But she smiles and she’s falling back into a line of thousands of thousands of girls, she’s beckoning to you and you know that you need nothing like you need her.

You throw your few spare tank tops into a bag you find in a closet, and rifle through your watcher’s papers until you find a letter from a certain Rupert Giles about Buffy Summers (you laugh at her name like you do everytime; the world sleeps at night thanks to a girl named _Buffy_ and her parents know nothing of destiny), an address scrawled on the envelope. You burn the town into your mind (there’s a Hellmouth above Sunnydale and a girl named Faith has none).

/

It’s easy to get the bus from Boston to New York (you still have about twenty five dollars and a knife sharp enough to cut bone) and you accidentally fall asleep somewhere in Connecticut, heart jumping, eyes wild.

You dream of her again and you don’t know what’s happening; she’s a fighting twirling mess and you’re a damn good fighter but there’s something (graceful) sharp about the way she cuts and slices. She’s smiling, hard and fast and dangerous and as you reach up to touch her the –

The bus jolts to a stop; a woman sits next to you and you fix her with your best _don’t fuck with me_ glare, you huddle back against the window and watch her until you reach New York.

/

Your money didn’t go far. You should have stolen (is it really stealing?) from your watcher’s house before you left but it’s way too late for that now (and you’re homeless on the streets of New York, nothing but a knife and something you were told was a superpower).

Stealing isn’t right, you suppose, but neither is dying before you get to see her spun gold self in person, so you flirt with trust fund boys (you’ve practiced to look, to sound, to seduce so that they ignore your sixteen year old face) and you steal their wallets while their friends are trying to feel you up.

(Your superpowers are better for more than just killing vamps, you discover. You make a damn good pickpocket, and something aches in you because you got these powers just a little too late).

It takes two weeks of sleeping on the sidewalk and hiding out in bathrooms when the cops catch you taking tourists’ backpacks in Grand Central before you have enough to buy a bus ticket to Chicago.

On your last night there, a vamp finds you (you kill him, dust his bones from your hands and throw up in an alley).

/

You still dream of her most nights (it’s the one thing that keeps you from doing something drastic, like stepping out in front of a taxi, or maybe jumping off one of those huge bridges they have here) and she laughs like she doesn’t know the feeling of graveyard dirt in her hair.

Sometimes you dream of another girl too but she flickers a warning of _don’t don’t don’t_ and you ignore her (what else do you have to do?) and she looks at you with something like regret, something like pity and you watch as her neck gets slit open and her blood spills out down her front.

“The life expectancy for a slayer is between seventeen and twenty-two,” you remember your watcher telling you. You mouth  _I’m sorry_ to the bloody girl because you know you were made out of her ashes.

But god, you watch her move, her blonde hair shining and you fall a little more in love every day.

/

“Fuck off,” you mutter, hoping that the leather and the very obvious knife in your hand will give these boys a hint (you haven’t fought a human since you changed, you’re more than a little scared to).

They just laugh, herding you farther and farther away from the bus stop and you’re getting angry.

“We just wanted to welcome you to Chicago, sweetheart,” and you lunge while they’re still laughing.

That night, you get enough money out of their wallets to stay in a motel room, and you scrub the blood and dirt from your hands (you hope to dream of her because you don’t think you can take one more night of watching the only person who ever loved you get ripped to shreds) (and you are helpless, helpless, helpless).

But she doesn’t glitter in this dream (she cries).

And you want to reach up and hold her, take her holy child hands and cradle them to your face but you’re (not really there) you can’t touch her.

“Giles, I’m sixteen years old,” she says, “I don’t want to die,” and you know quite concretely that she will.

You wake up the next morning and your mouth tastes like stale water (you gasp for breath, you not are drowning below the earth, virgin white).

/

You can only afford a ticket to the Middle of Nowhere, Nebraska so that’s what you buy, trying to hide your knife in your boot and making sure your shirt clings tight to your body when you flirt your way through paying for the child price ticket.

(“No sir,” you giggle, and lean over the ticket booth, “I _promise_ I’m thirteen,” and he looks so stupid sitting there you consider slicing him up with your knife but you grit your teeth and bat your eyelashes for nine fucking dollars.)

But Nebraska comes sooner than expected and you’re standing quite suddenly alone on the side of a road. You have seven dollar and eighty-four cents, three dirty tank tops, a bag of chips, your knife and _her_. A man drives past you and you flip him off and he keeps driving. You start walking.

You haven’t really taken a geography class since you were like eleven, but you figure if you keep walking west eventually something will show up.

Probably.

/

Something turns out to be a nineteen-year-old college student (what she’s doing in Nebraska you don’t ask; she doesn’t ask what some kid is doing wandering the roads alone at night).

She makes awkward small talk about the weather and you nod, finally she turns up the radio and drives in silence until she reaches the outskirts of a small town.

“I live here,” she point vaguely, “and I don’t usually do this, but – ” she glances at you (small, tight jeans, hopelessly tangled hair) and she sighs, “I have a spare couch and can probably throw together something to eat, if you want. Just for a couple nights, okay?”

You look too eager when you nod (saving up for bus tickets meant less food than you wanted; needed) and she looks terribly sad when you devour the entire box of crappy mac and cheese.

“Hannah,” she finally says. “I’m Hannah. I’m kind of studying economics right now, kind of taking a break from college. You?”

You stare at her for a second (what the fuck are you supposed to say? _Hi I fight vampires_ or maybe _I watched a monster tear apart the only real family I had and now I’m running I’m running I’m running_ ) and she starts to clean up the kitchen.

“Dawn. I’m Dawn,” and she so clearly knows it’s a lie, but she smiles at you, pretty and soft.

“Nice to meet you, Dawn,” and you reach across the table to grab an apple out of the fruit bowl.

She doesn’t say anything else until she’s putting a quilt on the couch, but she looks at you with those sad, sad eyes and says, “If something’s… not right at home, Dawn, you can stay here for a bit longer,” and you force a smile at her.

/

You rob her blind and leave at three in the morning.

/

Kakistos’ men almost catch up to you four days later (they leave you with a long cut running down your back; you leave them all dead).

Your dreams of her are more desperate and you know she can see you too (she knows you’re coming to her); you watch her kill a vampire and cry.

/

You see her for the first time in a crowded club (or what passed for a club in _Sunnydale_ ) and she seems to glimmer with magic, with something otherworldly (you have loved her since you dreamed of her the first night you were Called; she looks like a goddess or a queen or something holy).

It’s easy to see the vamps here, their oily slick running on your hands and you throw back your head and dance (you are alive; you are very nearly hers).

/

She looks at you in the cold night air; you realize quite suddenly that you are nothing more than a stranger to her.

You are her almost blood-sister and she cannot feel the soft warmth when your skin brushes hers, the pull (tug pull tug) that dragged you to her; she has no dreams, no golden remembrance of thousands upon thousands of girls curling up into your (her) your small body.

You swallow hard; you are always second best.

**Author's Note:**

> my writing's changed so much since i last wrote faith, and i think it's more suited to writing carmilla now but. i was thinking about my sweet girl and needed to write this


End file.
